The key Honda changes that convinced Red Bull

After seven races in 2017, McLaren-Honda had zero points to its name. Movements were already being made to dissolve the partnership, McLaren's confidence in the Japanese manufacturer was at an all-time low and the belief it could re-establish itself as a major Formula 1 player had crumbled.

After seven races in 2018, Honda, free from the torment of its cycle of failure with McLaren, had tempted Red Bull from Renault. Seven races and one upgrade is, on paper, all it took to convince a team winning races with its current engine supplier to pick up what McLaren had discarded.

There will be some who see McLaren's current struggles, which reached a new level with racing director Eric Boullier's resignation on Wednesday, as some sort of karmic retribution for the kicking it did while Honda was down.

It cannot be forgotten that during Honda's obvious and public struggles, McLaren twisted the knife by insisting how good its car was. Woking, we were assured, was emphatically not the problem. Now it seems there were a few people throwing stones from within a glass house.

Honda is a proud company and jibes like Fernando Alonso's "GP2 engine" comment during the 2015 Japanese Grand Prix would have hurt. It did not end there. In 2016, we were told McLaren would have won races with a different engine supplier. Last year, we heard more than once, including from Alonso, that McLaren's chassis was the best through the corners. It's not surprising this fostered a negative atmosphere and put pressure on Honda: the cracks that appeared may have fundamentally been Honda's doing, but McLaren had a part to play in how quickly and fatally they spread.

The team's current midfield plight, and Honda's progress with Toro Rosso, which has allowed it to snare Red Bull for 2019, makes for an uncomfortable situation for McLaren.

It went through three seasons of strife with Honda, lost patience and left. Now Red Bull is in position to swoop in and, in theory, take all the gain McLaren was waiting for without going through any of the pain.

"This is a very different situation than McLaren found themselves in. Honda has matured" Christian Horner

If McLaren wanted to avoid a rival being able to do that, it probably waited too long. As Honda motorsport boss Masashi Yamamoto says: "The first three years with McLaren after the return for Honda were very, very important because it was three years of learning what we had lost in the gap between last time and returning to F1. We're very appreciative of those three years."

It's easy to read those words and scoff 'What did Honda learn?' with haughty derision, particularly given the third season started in abysmal fashion. But it overlooks a tangible change that, while contributing to McLaren's pain, set the course for Honda's current revival.

Switching to a Mercedes-style engine layout required an oil tank redesign that Honda got dramatically wrong thanks to problems that did not emerge during dyno testing. The same went for a combustion engine tech change that was causing a loss of torque when upshifting, creating driveability problems.

Honda's problem was the oil tank cost it crucial pre-season testing mileage, so it took even longer to properly identify and solve the other limitations of its new package.

Ben Anderson's excellent piece on these flaws from last year offers a far more detailed explanation, but the relevance here is that this sowed the seeds for McLaren-Honda's divorce while at the same time paving the way for a steep development curve.

McLaren lost patience because the early part of the season was appalling and it took too long (in McLaren's eyes) for Honda to resolve the problems. But once it did, the performance and reliability of the package soared as its potential began to be realised. This is why Toro Rosso was not hugely concerned when McLaren split from Honda and the Red Bull junior team picked up the supply.

"I had the confidence already last year because Honda was much better than it was presented in the public," insists Toro Rosso team boss Franz Tost. His technical director James Key believes that by the end of 2017 Honda was already not far behind Renault, the engine McLaren was ditching all this progress to switch to.

"The headlines, and the very public thing you have with reliability, masked the fact that not only did they overcome all those problems but they made progress as well," says Key.

"So, by the end of the year they were pretty good, and the reliability problems had been ironed out. I think it masked it with time on the track, and they weren't able to show their full performance when they had such a difficult set of circumstances."

Key reckons the quality of the Honda package "wasn't highlighted anywhere nearly as much" when it came good, but Toro Rosso was paying close attention.

The improvement, he says, "is what impressed us - and made us less concerned than was suggested we should be". That meant the Toro Rosso-Honda partnership started better than outside observers probably thought.

This was vital for Honda's bigger ambitions. Red Bull made it very clear that it was a strategic decision to get its smaller team to work with Honda so it could monitor the manufacturer closely and make an informed decision for 2019, given its own relationship with Renault had been souring for some time. Honda would go into this crucial early-2018 period without Red Bull believing things were as bad as McLaren made out.

Red Bull would also play a key role in helping Honda avoid a repeat of its pre-season nightmare with McLaren. Honda had no major engine design overhaul planned for 2018 but there were still obvious reliability and performance gains to be made.

Its dyno testing had let it down 12 months earlier, but thanks to Red Bull Technologies, Honda now had access to rig facilities that would let it simulate the real-world impact of being fitted to a car much better than just on a dyno bench. Once the testing-spec engine was ready, an intensive run of pre-Barcelona bench work was completed, and is believed to have identified a couple of problems that Honda would otherwise have missed.

This was Red Bull's first reward for committing its junior team to Honda, and it was also payback for the manufacturer as well. Honda came under fire at times for a supposed hesitance to embrace engineers or technologies outside its own Japanese bubble while working with McLaren, but its new 'reliability first' philosophy, under the watch of new management, meant it would leave no stone unturned on this occasion.

With F1 project leader Yusuke Hasegawa stepping down in December 2017, Honda split his responsibilities between two people. Toyoharu Tanabe took charge of trackside operations as Honda's F1 technical director, while Yasuaki Asaki was tasked with heading up the development work at Sakura. The intention was to allow greater focus in each area, and it paid off, while impressing Red Bull at the same time.

It's somewhat unfair to summarise the input of Tanabe, a former F1 chief engineer and head of Honda's IndyCar project, and Asaki, originally a 1980s McLaren-Honda R&D bod who became a Honda road-car guru, in one paragraph.

But they have been cornerstones of two vital improvements: a greater emphasis on reliability and identifying priorities during development.

Honda worked with Toro Rosso to ensure it had reliability under control before beginning a clearly-established performance development path. This then became more achievable under the new structure because of Asaki-san's ability to give Sakura's immediate focus to one project and complete that without trying to do too much at once and failing.

"They were a little bit in recovery mode and in some cases a bit stressed after the previous year," says Key. "We gave them what we thought they had to achieve in terms of raw performance and also some ideas of where we needed to be with other aspects.

"We were very respectful. That's not just culturally important but the right way to behave. I've read a lot that with Toro Rosso the pressure was off: the pressure was not off at all. We're not going to sit there and say 'don't worry guys, just do what you need to do'. The pressure's on. It's just a positive pressure. So, we tried to create an atmosphere where they felt comfortable and be as disappointed as us if something went wrong."

While Toro Rosso did not put Honda under the same magnifying glass as McLaren, Key is right to point out that the pressure did not disappear. Honda had a reputation to rebuild in a tight midfield fight and, at the same time, knew it had a shot at a very rapid second chance with Red Bull.

"The headlines masked the fact that not only did Honda overcome all those problems but they made progress as well" Toro Rosso's James Key

Honda's progress in 2017 was consolidated by better work at Sakura and better reliability validation thanks to Red Bull Technologies over what Tost calls "intensive" winter months, and pre-season testing was unrecognisable.

Toro Rosso racked up the mileage, and performance was good too. Ignore any rumours you may have heard about Honda running through multiple engines to make that happen: this was real progress, not the result of constantly swapping power units.

Despite that, Honda still headed into the season with a "known issue" with its MGU-H. This led to Pierre Gasly retiring in Australia, but the problem had been identified at the start of the year and a solution was introduced for Bahrain. Gasly finished fourth there, trumping any result Honda scored with McLaren and eliminating any doubt that a new level of reliability and performance had been reached.

By this time, Red Bull was already pretty convinced about Honda. All that was left was to see if Honda's targets for its first engine upgrade of the season in Canada were met.

"Over the years you hear a lot of numbers mentioned but seeing it delivered trackside is ultimately what counts," says Red Bull team principal Christian Horner. "The stopwatch doesn't lie. We could see the progress and measure it following the Canadian GP."

Honda did not explicitly outline its upgrade package, but said it was "mainly" related to the combustion engine. Brendon Hartley also let slip over the weekend that he didn't have the "upgraded" MGU-H Gasly had.

Gasly also had an MGU-H change during this weekend, which suggests a problem with this component. Still, there has not been a flurry of MGU-H woe since, so Honda appears to have addressed the energy recovery system's reliability problems of 2017.

Horner said that by this point all Red Bull needed to be sure of was Honda's "delivery", which was an important test given it missed crucial performance targets and deadlines during its final year with McLaren. Honda had learned from this and its restructured organisation was not about to fall at the same hurdle. The combustion engine was Honda's performance target and thus Red Bull's focus: the team's verdict was that Honda had raised its level to "within 1%" of Renault. Job done. Under pressure from Renault to make a decision, Red Bull was happy to commit prior to the French GP and Honda sealed its shot at top-level redemption.

"This is a very different situation than McLaren found themselves in," says Horner. "Honda has matured. They've got a good structure in place, they're on a good development path."

There is no denying McLaren went through extreme pain with Honda, and though much of that was not of the race team's making, McLaren did have a role to play. Honda could have joined the F1 grid in 2016, but then-McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh did not want to wait. Tost reckons Honda started "one year too early". Honda also could have supplied more teams - its first dalliance with Red Bull came back in 2015 - but McLaren vetoed that.

Honda's progress has not been lost on McLaren. The team's CEO Zak Brown says: "Clearly Honda's taken a step forward this year. They are intelligent people who are working very hard. They've probably learned from the past three years.

"We collaborated with them a lot, gave them our views on areas we thought would help in their development. Good companies, good people learn from difficult times. Maybe we contributed to pointing out areas they could get stronger and embrace, and that's exactly what they've done."

Was the total collapse of McLaren-Honda perhaps what Honda itself needed in order to restructure, to rebuild, in the way that is serving Toro Rosso so well? That's tough to answer, but the evidence is that the new, refined Honda has found the final missing pieces to add to its immense financial and technical resource.

It has taken much longer than Honda wanted to reach this point, and it still has further to go. Big, bold targets await with Red Bull, just as they did with McLaren, but the difference now is Honda finally looks ready to hit them.